


day 17: how a life can move from the darkness

by halfwheeze



Series: thirty ways to wreck a train [17]
Category: Buzzfeed The Try Guys (Web Series), Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Buzzfeed: Worth It (Web Series)
Genre: Double Date, High School AU, Triple Date
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-03-26
Packaged: 2019-04-08 15:06:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14107998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfwheeze/pseuds/halfwheeze
Summary: The seven of them are a stereotype, honestly. Well. There’s a lot of ways in which they aren’t, like being three same sex couples, one of which is polyamorous, but, in all the other ways, they’re stereotypical.





	day 17: how a life can move from the darkness

**Author's Note:**

> hi! this is day seventeen of a 30-day series I'm trying out! I can't say that I'll be fantastic at it, but I'm gonna try!
> 
> day seventeen is double, or in this case triple, date! hope you enjoy!

The seven of them are a stereotype, honestly. Well. There’s a lot of ways in which they aren’t, like being three same sex couples, one of which is polyamorous, but, in all the other ways, they’re stereotypical. Teenagers going out on the town piling into one minivan that shouldn’t even remotely be expected to carry all of them, heading to get milkshakes and go hang out, maybe see a movie on a Friday evening with the whole gaggle of them giggling. Shane is driving and Ryan is in passenger, their usual composite structure with the addition of Eugene and Zach holding onto each other in the second row and Adam, Andrew and Steven somehow laying all over each other in the very back. Ryan can’t stop himself from smiling and it makes it better when Shane reaches across the gear shift to hold his hand. 

He likes holding Shane’s hands. His right hand is rougher than his left, full of calluses and there are knobs on his fingers from where Shane told him that he broke his middle and ring finger once. He doesn’t know how Shane did it, but Ryan has come to love the little scar between the two fingers, and the knobs on his knuckles, and the marks on his hands where Shane has accidentally cut himself because he’s beautiful and clumsy and makes so many pretty mistakes. Shane’s hands are also bigger than Ryan’s, fingers longer though his palm is not as wide. The silence inside of his head is interrupted by the sound of Zach’s voice, breaking through the lovestruck haze. 

“Hey, dipshit, you wanna actually put on music?” Zach jokingly suggests, kicking the center console lightly, just enough to make noise. Ryan laughs at himself and pulls his phone out of his back pocket, shimmying so he can grab it comfortably. Shane looks over at him briefly with a grin, squeezing his hand and lifting it to press a kiss to the back of it. Zach and Eugene roast them from the second seat, inspiring questions and then laughter from the peanut gallery in the very back. Ryan knows he’s blushing when he finally plugs in his phone to the aux cord one handed, blasting Bleachers through the speakers. All of them are screaming the lyrics by the time they reach the chorus,  _ I Wanna Get Better _ being the queer anthem of the year. Ryan gives the back of Shane’s hand a belated kiss. Shane grins again. 

“How are they gayer than us?” Eugene whispers in the back, but Ryan can still kinda hear him; it’s mostly a guess, more than anything. Ryan laughs still, on a high of loving this moment, and he puts  _ I Wanna Get Better  _ on repeat because no one can stop him, and he knows Shane won’t mind. Shane let him get away with whatever music he wanted  _ before  _ they started dating, so everyone knows that Shane’ll let him get away with anything now. And, at the very least, it seems to be a song everyone likes. He can even sorta hear Adam’s voice among the rest when they’re all still screaming along, completely out of it in the third or fourth play of the song. When Shane pulls up to the milkshake shop, they stay in the van until the song finishes its fifth run, still singing out of tune and off key. 

“Alright, let’s do this,” Ryan announces, yanking his phone off of the aux cord and opening his door, getting out of his seat in one fluid motion. Shane follows suit immediately, Eugene and Zach following soon thereafter, and Shane has to help Andrew, Steven and Adam out; no one else knows how to work the seats in his contraption of a van. Ryan knows that Shane loves this huge, hulking monster, and that’s enough for Ryan to think fondly of the ancient mom van. They’re all laughing again by the time Adam stumbles out of the backseat, finally stepping onto the ground again. 

“I feel like I’m coming out of a tomb,” Adam says, quiet in the way he always is, and it makes the entire event even funnier. Zach and Shane try to shush them as they begin to enter the shop, but there’s a lot of staring anyway; Ryan can’t find a single fuck in the world to give. He’s seventeen and in love and openly queer for the first time in his life, and he feels good about himself and his friends and he’s  _ happy, _ and some strangers in a greasy diner are not going to change that. The lady working seems to think that they’re funny anyway, smiling as she seats them and takes their order. They all get milkshakes of varying flavors and Shane gets fries, which Andrew and Zach immediately follow suit on; Ryan knows that a lot of friends are about to be boyfriend-commandeered. Including the fries of his own boyfriend, because now Ryan wants fries. 

“So how was everybody’s days?” Andrew asks after an allotted moment of silence, and several people around the table laugh. If there’s any kind of silence during any kind of meal, even just a snack, Andrew will say just that phrase in just that tone, a perfunctory action that comes naturally to him. Ryan wonders idly whether he got it from his mom or his dad or both or someone else entirely, because Ryan knows he gets stuff like that from his mom. They’re sitting in one of those corner booths that are meant to sit about six people, but the seven of them fit in fine even though Andrew is built like a brick shithouse around the shoulders and Shane is the lankiest person in all of existence and maybe in fictional universes too. Ryan nudges Shane with his shoulder, displacing his boyfriend slightly; he can admit that he just likes how that sounds in his head.  _ Boyfriend.  _ Shane Madej is his  _ boyfriend.  _

“I don’t know, I’m pretty good,” Steven replies, but he’s also all up in Andrew’s grill leaning against his shoulder, and Adam is practically in his lap, and Ryan imagines he’d be having a good time too. Well, he’s having a good time anyway with Shane’s hand tangled with his on his thigh, resting so that Shane’s hand is actually on his thigh just between his legs. It’s not, like, weird or public indecency or anything, but it feels nice to have their shared, reassuring weight against him so intimately. He thinks that Shane is reassured by it too, based on the swipe of his thumb across Ryan’s knuckles just so soon as anyone even speaks aloud, let alone looks at him. 

“School ain’t shit, but everything else is good,” Shane says, straight faced and without humor, and everyone at the table laughs, nodding in agreement. Junior year is kicking all of their asses, and that’s part of the reason why they’re out tonight: three of seven of them had an English benchmark today, and one had had an AP test. Instead of making them less sociable, like normal people, it just adds to their need to be out of the house, Ryan thinks, out of his own head. He leans into Shane a little more heavily and watches Shane’s comfortable reaction, pulling his hand out of Ryan’s and throwing his arm around Ryan’s shoulder. It’s lucky he’s got the longest limbs of all time, because he tangles the fingers of his other hand with Ryan’s now free hand, just holding him close now. 

“You guys are sickening,” Eugene tells them, like he doesn’t have Zach leaning all over his lap and in his personal space, despite how he talks about not liking affection so much. Ryan raises a single eyebrow and watches as Eugene seems to realise his own hypocrisy, and Ryan laughs when it makes Zach stick out his tongue at him. He gets distracted from the impromptu staring contest when something flies across the table, small and white, into his shirt. 

“Score!” Steven says excitedly, bouncing as much as he can with a whole human leaning on him. Adam kisses his cheek in congratulations and Steven melts, looking at his boyfriend instead of the new competition, and Ryan scores the balled up straw paper down his shirt easily. Steven looks up in alarm. 

“You started it,” Ryan comments, shrugging as much as he can with the welcome weight of Shane’s arms around his shoulders. 

“You guys are children,” Eugene says, immediately prior to throwing his entire straw at Andrew, getting it down the other boy’s shirt. 

**Author's Note:**

> Leave me a prompt @halfwheeze on tumblr, and I'll get to it when I can!


End file.
